from the that's-ridiculous dept

A few years back, we had a few stories about ridiculous situations in which the Bulgarian Chess Federation was trying to claim copyright on chess moves and had even sued a website for copyright infringement for broadcasting the moves. Of course, chess moves are not just factual information, but they're historically written down and shared widely, because that's part of how people learn to play chess (and get better at it). Studying the moves in various games is part of how people practice chess, and no one is expected to claim "ownership" over the chess moves, because they can't.

And yet... we've just come across two separate cases, involving one particular organizer of chess tournaments, trying to abuse the law to block reporting on chess moves -- in both Russia and the US. Both cases are ridiculous, and thankfully, both have failed so far. The Moscow case actually kicked off back in the spring, when the organization Agon, which runs World Chess Championships and the website WorldChess.com, sued some websites, including Chess24, for posting the chess moves of live events. Thankfully, the Commercial Court of the City of Moscow rejected the lawsuit a few weeks ago, though Agon has said it will appeal. There are a number of reasons why Agon lost the case, but the key one:

Art. 14.7 of the Competition Act does not apply in particular since the Plaintiff did not establish a regime of commercial secrecy for the information about the chess moves. On the contrary, this information was in the public domain (as the Plaintiff himself admits on page 6 of the statement of claim). Consequently, information about the chess moves is not a trade secret and is not protected by law. Accordingly, the Defendant did not receive, use or disclose information that was a trade or other secret protected by law i.e. he did not violate Art. 14.7 of the Competition Act.

Then, just days after that ruling in Moscow, a very similar case was filed in the US by World Chess -- which is owned by Agon. And, it also targeted Chess24, one of the same companies it had sued in Moscow. In the US, it's clear that there's no copyright claim to be made in chess moves -- too many cases clearly preclude trying to claim a copyright in factual data, especially factual data about sports/competitions. Instead, World Chess focused on the pretty much dead and discredited "hot news" claims against a few other chess sites. The entire complaint can basically be summarized as "but... wah... it's not fair!"

Defendants have made a pattern and practice of copying and redistributing
in real time the chess moves from tournaments covered byWorld Chess shortly after the moves
appear on World Chess’s website, and unless restrained by this Court will do the same with
respect the November 2016 Championship.

World Chess not only asked for an injunction against Chess24 -- but also demanded that the court order the domains of the defendants be transferred over to World Chess. The defendants hit back with a detailed explanation of how ridiculous World Chess's lawsuit was:

By its Application for a Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction,
Plaintiffs World Chess US, Inc. and World Chess Events Ltd. (collectively, “Plaintiffs”) seek to
prevent legitimate chess-oriented websites from reporting on, discussing, and analyzing one of
the major chess matches of the year – even though the information Chess24 seeks to report on
will already be readily available to the public. Plaintiffs attempt to do so by claiming that
because they are the organizers and promoters of the chess match they have an intangible,
enforceable property right in the facts surrounding that match, and therefore have the exclusive
right to publish and report on what the players are doing. The claims made by Plaintiffs run
contrary to the well-established law of this Circuit and public policy.

Chess24 points out that World Chess is clearly just trying to do an endrun around well-established copyright law, and that's a big no-no.

Plaintiffs know that the moves made by professional chess players are precisely the type
of factual material that is not protectable by copyright law. But it also cannot be protected under
theories of common law misappropriation. The law is absolutely clear in this Circuit that state
law claims for misappropriation of unprotectable facts – including live sports plays – are
preempted by Section 301 of the Copyright Act. In an effort to avoid preemption, Plaintiffs have
relied on an extremely narrow exception for so-called “hot news misappropriation.” That
exception plainly does not apply here. In fact, Plaintiffs almost completely ignore the dispositive
case in this area -- NBA v. Motorola, 105 F.3d 841, 846 (2d Cir. 1996). In Motorola, the Second
Circuit expressly rejected the exact same claim that Plaintiffs attempt to argue here, involving
almost the exact same factual circumstances. Specifically, that case held that the NBA could not
prevent Motorola from attending and watching basketball games and selling play-by-play
accounts of the game to its mobile customers. In contrast to this dispositive case law, Plaintiffs
are unable to cite even a single case upholding an injunction like the one sought by Plaintiffs in
even remotely similar circumstances.

Oh, and also, Chess24 points out to the court that (1) Agon/World Chess just lost a nearly identical case in Moscow and (2) it waited until just days before the tournament in question started to try to force a quick injunction:

Even more
telling is the fact that although Plaintiffs have been in litigation with Chess24 in Moscow since
March (Plaintiffs recently lost that case), they waited until just four days before the start of the
WCC to bring this motion. Plaintiffs’ decision to file their lengthy motion at the eleventh hour is
not just sharp tactics; it confirms that there is no actual irreparable injury in need of remediation.

There was a hearing in court, and the judge, Victor Marrero, rejected World Chess/Agon's request for an injunction. As of writing this, the court has only posted the short order without the full explanation, which is expected to be published later. But, given the facts here, it seems fairly obvious why the court rejected the case -- and it's all of the many reasons that Chess24 laid out in its brief.

Hopefully, these companies can finally get it through their heads that you can't copyright chess.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

In case you missed it, humanity has been dealt a decisive intellectual blow by a go-playing computer program called AlphaGo. We mentioned AlphaGo back in January when Google announced that it had defeated European Go champion Fan Hui and was challenging Lee Sedol next. So now that the results are in, AlphaGo has shown the world that artificial intelligence can best the best of humanity at our most difficult games. We've seen this already with chess, and if you don't remember, people tried to make a variant of chess called Arimaa that humans could hold up as a game people could win over computers (ahem, that didn't work). We still have Calvinball, Diplomacy and certain forms of poker....

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've seen plenty of advances in game algorithms that make us humans look pretty weak compared to the best chess (and checkers and poker and RPS and air hockey and Flappy bird and...) playing computers. Computers aren't having any fun beating us at all these games, but they do it nonetheless. As always, let's just hope they figure out quickly that no one wins at thermonuclear war.

from the back-to-the-future dept

Intellectual property is often times used to censor others or control that which should otherwise be free. Sometimes it does this for arguably valid reasons. And sometimes it does so in ways so laughably and obviously against the intention of intellectual property protections that it would make you laugh if you weren't too busy yelling in anger. This story is about an example of the latter.

Marcel Duchamp was first and foremost a French-American artist. He painted and sculpted, composed music, and constructed kinetic works of art. He was also an avid player of chess, going so far at one point as to fashion his own chess set personally from wood while in Buenos Aires. This chess set, originally thought to be lost to the world but now confirmed to be part of a privately-owned collection, survived until recently only in archival photographs of the man and his chess pieces. Until, that is, Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera used the photograph to come up with the Readymake: Duchamp Chess Set, which would allow a person to 3D-print Duchamp's chess set for themselves. Kildall and Cera then uploaded the 3D files to Thingiverse and made them available for all to download. Here is how they described the project.

Readymake: Duchamp Chess Set is a 3D-printed chess set generated from an archival photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s own custom and hand-carved game. His original physical set no longer exists. We have resurrected the lost artifact by digitally recreating it, and then making the 3D files available for anyone to print.

We were inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade — an ordinary manufactured object that the artist selected and modified for exhibition — the readymake brings the concept of the appropriated object to the realm of the internet, exploring the web’s potential to re-frame information and data, and their reciprocal relationships to matter and ideas. Readymakes transform photographs of objects lost in time into shared 3D digital spaces to provide new forms and meanings.

Pictured: an example of the 3D modeling from the archive photo of the chess set

Cool, right? The duo's project generated some press after they uploaded it and the two were particularly thrilled to see a discussion emerge between artists and technologists about just what could be done in 3D printing material generated form archival photos. Adjacent to those discussions were conversations about the ownership of design and ideas, which, while interesting, Kildall and Cera didn't think were germane to Duchamp's chess set for any number of reasons (more on that in a moment). Regardless, the estate of Duchamp apparently caught wind of the project and promptly sent a cease and desist letter.

Unfortunately, the project also struck a nerve with the Duchamp Estate. On September 17th, 2014, we received a cease and desist letter from a lawyer representing the heirs of Marcel Duchamp. They were alleging intellectual property infringement on grounds that they held a copyright to the chess pieces under French law.

Except that doesn't make any sense for any number of reasons. Kildall and Cera outline why they chose Duchamp's chess set for the project and, to my reading, they appear to be correct on every count.

1) Duchamp’s chess pieces were created in 1917-1918. According to US copyright law, works published before 1923 are in the realm of “expired copyright”.

2) The chess pieces themselves were created in 1917-1918 while Duchamp was in Argentina. He then brought the pieces back to France where he worked to market them.

3) According to French copyright law, copyrighted works are protected for 70 years after the author’s death.

4) Under French copyright law, you can be sued for damages and even serve jail time for copyright infringement.

5) The only known copy of the chess set is in a private collection. We were originally led to believe the set was ‘lost’ – as it hasn’t been seen, publicly, for decades.

6) For the Estate to pursue us legally, the most common method would be to get a judgment in French court, then get a judgment in a United States court to enforce the judgement.

7) Legal jurisdiction is uncertain. As United States citizens, we are protected by U.S. copyright law. But, since websites like Thingiverse are global, French copyright could apply.

Except that, all that being said, this isn't a work of art we're talking about. Duchamp created his chess set so that he could play chess. It wasn't something he sought to reproduce for sale. He played chess. This would be akin to me drawing a four-square board on the sidewalk in chalk and then claiming I have copyright over it. That's insane. If copyright is built to encourage expression, how does having the one chess set Duchamp ever created locked away in a private collection deserve copyright protection? There's no further expression to encourage. And, indeed, under American copyright law, the clock has run out on the protection anyway. The fact that the Duchamp estate would try to apply French copyright law to this case, where the creation happened in Argentina and when Duchamp himself became a naturalized American citizen, is crazy-pants.

The duo's solution was to lay down their king and take the files down. Well, that was step one in their solution, at least.

We thought about how to recoup the intent of this project without what we think will be a copyright infringement claim from the Duchamp Estate and realized one important aspect of the project, which would likely guarantee it as commentary is one of parody.

Accordingly, we have created Chess with Mustaches, which is based on our original design, however, adds mustaches to each piece. The pieces no longer looks like Duchamp’s originals, but instead improves upon the original set with each piece adorned with mustaches.

If you're not fully aware of Duchamp's artwork, this solution is especially clever because the Duchamp estate would have a difficult time arguing that this is inappropriate, given Duchamp's own artwork. So, it's funny, but that never should have been necessary in the first place. The Duchamp estate's use of copyright to disappear recreative files for a chess set once constructed is a bastardization of copyright's intent.

from the there's-an-app-for-that dept

I love chess. As the original multi-player turn-based strategy game, chess serves as the backbone for many a modern era game, for which it has my respect. Despite this love I have for the game, I happen to be quite horrible at it, but that only makes me all the more reverent of those that master its wily machinations. Kasparov is a name I know solely because he was a grand champion, one of those faces of chess that spurred on so much intrigue as people wondered just how he was able to dominate his opponents so completely.

Gaioz Nigalidze was one of those folks, too, having attained the title of grandmaster, but now he isn't. He might actually be as good as advertised, but we can't trust that he is any longer because he was found to be using a iPhone to cheat his way through a match. The plot begins and ends, as all good plots do, in the toilet.

On Saturday, Nigalidze, the 25-year-old reigning Georgian champion, was competing in the 17th annual Dubai Open Chess Tournament when his opponent spotted something strange.

“Nigalidze would promptly reply to my moves and then literally run to the toilet,” Armenian grandmaster Tigran Petrosian said. “I noticed that he would always visit the same toilet partition, which was strange, since two other partitions weren’t occupied.”

Yes, the strange part was which toilet Nigalidze used, not the fact that his bladder decided to punctuate each move with a potty trip. As it turns out, Nigalidze had hidden an iPhone in one of the restrooms, wrapped in toilet paper because there ain't no stealth in chess, and had been running the game he was playing through an application that analyzed and suggested moves. In other words, he totally h4x0red that chess tournament, ya'll!

It turns out that being the Barry Bonds of chess isn't great for one's career and Nigalidze's past and future have both been placed in jeapordy.

Nigalidze was expelled from the tournament, which is still ongoing and features more than 70 grandmasters from 43 countries competing for a first-place prize of $12,000. The Georgian’s career is now under a microscope. His two national titles are under suspicion. And under recently tightened rules against cheating, he could be banned for up to 15 years.

This has reportedly sent the chess world into some kind of insane tailspin over concerns that, now that someone has proved that cheating in tournaments with a small device such as a phone is doable, who knows how many other of our revered grandmasters are big, steaming, salty cheat-burgers? The ancient game is now understood to be relatively easy to master with something as common as a smartphone, which means chess tournaments are about to get way more TSA-like with security, I guess.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Artificial intelligence software has been getting better and better over the years at beating humans at their own games. Games like Connect Four and Checkers are already solved, and while we humans might like to point out that there are games like Othello, Go, Diplomacy and Calvinball that still favor human players, it may only be a matter of time before computers outwit us at those games, too. Check out a few more games that algorithms are learning to play better than human brains.

from the let-the-wookie-win dept

Whenever one is forced to bear witness to the predictable silliness of the moral panic of the day, it is useful to recall all the past moral panics that we now consider so equally silly. We've written before about the relatively recent hand-wringing over modern entertainment ventures such as tabletop boardgames, video games, and even ghost stories told on that most-dreaded of mediums, the internet. Most recently, the moral panic that had once focused its misguided eyes upon violence has inexplicably shifted to hacking, with warnings abounding that ten-year-olds everywhere will be crashing our civic infrastructure with their iPhones and all the rest. It should be apparent that all this is stupid on its face, but even forgiving the general public's inability to make that determination, the point should be unassailable when put into historical context.

One word, however, to the sempiternal chess-players, whom we meet everywhere: they are, for the most part, persons with long well-filled heads and ambitious hearts; which if they devoted to the further improvement of useful arts, sciences, inventions, &c., only half the time they squander in contests for victories "baseless as the fabric of a vision," this sacrifice alone would liberate at least ten thousand profound thinkers on the globe for the service of their own times and generation, and compensate for the rather selfish and unsocial species of warfare which two of a company carry on for hours together, to the annoyance and exclusion of all the rest from the charms of their conversation and intelligent minds.

That is the writing of a physician in 1883 and it operates under the notion that the time in which we must pursue the useful arts and abandon any form of pleasure or entertainment is limitless and without diminishing returns. If only the people of the world would put down their rooks and pick up a chemistry set, we'd have the elixir of life worked out and eternity would be our playground! You hear this argument all the time when it comes to gaming: those damned kids should be reading/playing outside/studying/etc. It makes a certain amount of sense until you decide to understand that anything without moderation is dangerous and most things in moderation are not. It's entertainment after all, and suggesting that people who play chess or video games should instead be furthering the useful arts only makes sense as an argument if you also propose closing up all the movie theaters, sports leagues, golf courses, parks and swimming pools. The only thing that was different about chess at the time, and video games now, is that they were/are new, which apparently makes them scary.

But, of course, you just can't have a moral panic without predictions of apathy and violence. This first quotation comes from An Introduction to the History and Study of Chess, published in 1804.

Richlet, in his Dictionary, article Echec, writes, " It is said, that the Devil, in order to make poor Job lose his patience, had only to engage him at a game at Chess."...Col. Stewart, who had been aid-de-camp to the Earl of Stair, and was afterwards one of the Quarter-masters General in the Duke of Cumberland's time, used frequently to play with the Earl, who was very fond of the game; but an unexpected check-mate used to put his Lordship into such a passion, that he was ready to throw a candlestick, or any thing else that was near him, at his adversary; the prudent Colonel always took care therefore, to be on his feet, to fly to the farthest corner of the room, when he said, " check-mate, my Lord!"...King John was playing at Chess when the deputies from Rouen came to acquaint him that their city was besieged, but he would not hear them until he had finished his game. Charles I. was also playing at it when news was brought of the resolution of the Scots to sell him to the English ; but so little was he discomposed by this alarming intelligence, that he continued his game with the utmost composure.

Yes, chess, in the very tome that endeavored to examine the game in detail, was blamed for biblical corruption, peer-on-peer violence, and apathy of a King. What a cruel, twisted game this must be. It's almost comical to note that video games, the entertainment of children today, have been blamed for sin, violence, and general apathy toward the things we're all supposed to be focusing on, according to the whims of others. It's... the... same... exact... story. So much so, in fact, that it becomes instantly frustrating knowing this history and seeing it play out all over again.

The young become old and repeat the moral panic pattern of their parents, for some stupid reason. Maybe it's in our DNA. Maybe it's a function of a society that creates generational age-groups the way we have. Or maybe it's the fault of some new fad that my peers will soon be blaming for all the world's ills. Personally, I blame chess.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

As artificial intelligence projects get more advanced, the questions of how to measure general intelligence become increasingly more important. Tests such as beating humans at chess and conversing with people naturally are somewhat crude ways to judge the improvements in silicon-derived cognition. And as many point out, when AI projects do succeed in beating humans at chess (or other intelligent tasks), people move the goal posts and say that chess isn't really an intelligent task or that the computer's approach is fundamentally different from a human's mind. Here are just a few links about humans and computers improving by copying off each other.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's cheating, and then there's cheating. There are obviously bad scams that hurt people or involve the loss of significant amounts of money or property, but some scams are hurtful on a much smaller scale. Here are just a few notable examples of some cheaters who were caught red-handed.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's a sucker born every minute -- if you like to believe unverifiable statistics. Usually, if it's too good to be true, it ain't true. But as technology gets better, sometimes it's hard to distinguish sufficiently advanced algorithms from magic. Here are a few scams that successfully fooled some folks for a while.